INTRODUCTION
I was never any good at art during my school days so all the more surprising that I now draw aeroplanes as a hobby. Even today I still can’t paint or draw free hand but I did have a good grounding in pen, ink and pencil drawing when I joined a firm of Architects on leaving school. I spent the first week sitting behind a drawing board, with a wooden T-square, drawing straight lines at different angles. We had a landscape artist join the firm and I would go out with him and photograph building sites and half completed properties. Back in the office I would process the 35mm black & white film and run off A4 sized photographic prints from which he would trace the outlines and along with the architectural scale drawings, would add detail to illustrate in pen and ink what the completed projects would look like. When I was made redundant and before I joined the Civil Service, I had a bit of time on my hands and a good collection of drawing materials so I basically copied his technique and substituted aeroplanes for buildings. I started out drawing freehand, like he did, but over the years I refined that technique and now use a variety of technical pens and drawing instruments to achieve the straight lines and curves.
Why Do I Draw Aeroplanes?
It’s probably in the blood as I was born at RAF Hospital Ely, Cambridgeshire and as a child I traveled around a lot as my father was in the Royal Air Force and I have spent all my life living and working around aeroplanes. I have now gone full circle and back living in Cambridgeshire and following 16 years working at RAF Wyton, retired after 31 years 317 days as a Civil Servant with the Ministy of Defence. I started by washing Vulcan’s at RAF Scampton and finished sitting behind a desk pen pushing. My interest in aviation art and photography started about the same time as I turned my technical illustrating skills to scale aircraft drawing. For accurate drawings, you need accurate information and the photographs were purely for reference purposes and usually consisted of a walk around of an aircraft photographing as much detail of the airframe as I could.